Review: Who Doesn't Love Dutch Flower Paintings?

Dutch Flowers, The National Gallery ★★★☆☆

Tabish Khan
By Tabish Khan Last edited 104 months ago

Last Updated 11 April 2016

Review: Who Doesn't Love Dutch Flower Paintings? Dutch Flowers, The National Gallery 3
Dark and light. Flowers by Jan Bruegel the elder and Paulus Theodorus van Brussel respectively. Copyright Private Collection & The National Gallery.

Paintings of beautiful flowers, what's not to love. Dutch painters excelled at it and this one room display is bursting with colour.

The detail in every work is superb and closer investigation reveals they are teeming with life. A bumblebee crawls around the back of a vase, a butterfly gently lands on a petal and there is a lizard and birds' nests too.

It's all so perfectly pretty, but the downside is that they lack the depth and narrative you'd find in other paintings within The National Gallery.

This is a true feast for the eyes and there's no doubt every visitor will marvel at the colours and techniques. The best advice is to turn off your brain and just let your eyes take it all in.

Dutch Flowers is on in Room 1, The National Gallery, until 29 August. Entrance is free. For more floral paintings, visit the extremely popular Painting the Modern Garden at The Royal Academy of Arts.